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Recap of Serial’s ‘The Improvement Association’ Chapter 3: Nursing Home Ballots

This is a recap of the third episode of the five-episode podcast series “The Improvement Association,” from Serial Productions. In the series, reporter Zoe Chace uses a case in Bladen County, North Carolina, to examine the power of election fraud allegations. This is not a transcript and is not meant to be a substitute for listening to the podcast episodes.

Chapter Three: ‘The Ballad of the Nursing Home Ballots’

In the first episode of “The Improvement Association” podcast we got background on the Bladen County absentee voter fraud scandal of 2018 (here’s an Episode 1 recap), particularly in regard to the relationship between the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black Democratic voter advocacy group, and McCrae Dowless, who is facing criminal charges for his actions while working for NC Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris.

In Episode 2, reporter Zoe Chace explored allegations from critics of the Improvement Association PAC who believe, essentially, that whatever Dowless did, the PAC was doing it first. She interviewed Bladen citizens and looked into their allegations, finding no proof of wrongdoing (you can read the recap of Episode 2 to keep up).

The third episode, released April 20, focuses on an allegation that the PAC was involved in its own absentee ballot scandal — an incident involving absentee ballots at a nursing home — long before the Dowless incident of 2018.

Here’s the recap of Chapter Three.

Chace says she first heard about this infamous nursing home case from a man named Ray Britt. Britt is a county commissioner and former Bladen County board of elections member, and owns a jewelry and furniture store in Elizabethtown.

Britt, a white Republican, tells Chace that during the Prentis Benston 2010 sheriff’s race (detailed in Chapter 1), someone from the Improvement PAC had nursing home residents — residents who were said to be mentally incapable of voting — fill out ballots, and that no one from the county or state boards of elections did anything to investigate it.

This is essentially what Dowless has been charged with doing in the 2018 congressional election, except on a much larger scale.

The “Ballad of the Nursing Home Ballots” refrain is always the same, Chace says: “Nothing was ever done, no one looked into it, the state didn’t care. Or, if they did look into it, they covered up what they found.”

Chace tells us that someone in Bladen even said to her, in reference to the nursing home allegations not being investigated: “You can’t touch them precious things,” meaning Black people.

So Chace sets out to figure out exactly what happened with these nursing home ballots — and it’s important to note that we’re talking about fewer than 10 ballots here.

No one investigated the nursing home?

The story starts with Britt.

First, Britt tells Chace that he wasn’t the least bit concerned about what Dowless did, and wants to know why no one has looked into the “evidence” that his side (the Republicans) are concerned about.

Chace indicates that Britt makes a lot of vague statements, and then either refuses to tell her what he means, or she has to spend several interviews drawing bits of information out of him.

It’s in their third interview that he finally gives her the details about the nursing home ballots.

Britt tells her that a few days before the election, a local pastor, Kincy Barrow, came into the store and told him that people were voting in the nursing home who hadn’t had a family member in years. Barrow had seen some ballots there about to be mailed, and he said he knew those people (mostly Black) couldn’t make their own choices.

Britt, who was on the county board of elections at the time, passed the complaint to the head of the board, who passed it to the state board of elections.

Nothing was ever done, Britt tells Chace. He insists that the state never spoke to anyone at the nursing home.

“With that being said, I rest my case on that,” Britt says.

Was it investigated? ‘Lord yes’

Chace tells us that when she tries to “fact check” the nursing home story, it “starts to fall apart pretty quickly.”

Had this ever been investigated? “Lord yes,” Marshall Tudor told Chace. Tudor was an investigator with the North Carolina State Board of Elections at the time.

It actually sounds like Bladen County kept Tudor pretty busy, back in the day.

Tudor tells Chace that this issue keeps coming up because Britt and others in Bladen County keep telling people that he did nothing to investigate the nursing home allegations. But he insists that he investigated it thoroughly.

He said he talked to the nursing home staff and could not find a single thing “provable,” and he talked to family members of the people in question, and none of them said anything wrong had happened.

Chace asks him if the Bladen Improvement Association was involved in this in any way and he says no.

Chace even gets a box of Tudor’s investigation notes and checks his work. Looks legit.

But, she also notes that Britt doesn’t trust Tudor. Britt doesn’t trust anyone at the state board of elections, because he says they are biased against Republicans.

Looking for more evidence, Chace finds the envelopes for the ballots in question (the actual ballots are secret) locked in a safe in the Bladen County Board of Elections office.

She takes the envelopes to Barrow, the pastor who first saw the envelopes at the nursing home and reported it to Britt.

Barrow confirmed they were the envelopes he had seen. Together, Barrow and Chace look at the name of the witness on the envelope, and Barrow says he knows who she is, but doesn’t know if she’s associated with the PAC.

This woman, who is unnamed in the podcast, still works at the nursing home, so Chace goes over to talk to her. The woman didn’t want to talk, but Chace does ask her if she was working for the Bladen Improvement Association PAC. Chace says the woman looked genuinely confused and didn’t seem to know who that was.

Does Britt believe this? Nope.

So Chace gets the paperwork for the PAC, which she describes as “generally pretty scrupulous,” and doesn’t see the woman’s name listed anywhere.

She asks various members of the PAC if they know who she is and they say no.

Chace tells us that it is “technically illegal” for a nursing home staffer to assist residents with a ballot, but Tudor, the state investigator, said he interviewed the nursing home staff 10 years ago and decided that the woman had made an honest mistake.

She was trying to help people vote, Tudor said.

Tudor told his boss at the time that the most positive thing to come out of the nursing home situation was that the worker who witnessed the ballots and the nursing home administrator have “both told me going forward things such as this will not happen again, because they are more informed on what can be done for a resident related to voting and what cannot be done.”

Tudor concluded, Chace tells us, that what happened at the nursing home was not a big deal, did not involve the PAC, and was not something that could or should be prosecuted.

But, Chace says, that doesn’t mean that no one cheated in that sheriff’s race.

Yes, there was cheating

Tudor tells Chace that he spent years going to Bladen County to investigate various cheating allegations. It was a “number one destination,” he says.

And that 2010 sheriff’s race in particular was a bruiser, he tells Chace.

“I couldn’t put a number on the people I interviewed down there,” he says. “It was continuous.”

Most of the allegations were minor, Tudor tells Chace — stuff like deputies campaigning on the clock or using county cars to put up campaign signs.

And Tudor says that the people in Bladen County believe that “everybody is vote-buying” — and by “everybody” he means the PAC, because they are powerful. Whichever candidate is in opposition to the PAC’s candidate will accuse them of vote-buying, Tudor says.

Chace asks him if he’s ever found any evidence of vote-buying by the PAC.

No, Tudor said.

In fact, Tudor said Horace Munn, the head of the Bladen PAC (more detail on him in Chapter 1), checked with him often to make sure they were doing things correctly, because Munn knew the PAC was under intense scrutiny. And any time Tudor found “irregularities,” Munn would correct the issue quickly (an example of an irregularity Tudor gives is that their sample ballot at one time did not identify that it was from the PAC).

‘Old South’ tactics

Tudor tells Chace that the situation during that sheriff’s race reminded him of how things went on in “the Old South.”

The stakes were high: you had a Black candidate vs. a white candidate fighting for the most powerful position in the county.

And Tudor tells Chace that he had a very good case against some people who were committing voter fraud. This case involved “white people who were well thought-of in the Black community” going to (mostly elderly) Black citizens who had received an absentee ballot and collecting those ballots — and throwing them away.

Tudor said he had statements from Black voters assuring him that a certain person had picked up each of their ballots (again, illegal in North Carolina, if you’re not a family member), and the ballots never got to the board of elections.

The people who picked them up were a former probation officer and a former narcotics investigator, both white women, both unnamed in the podcast. Both women supported the white candidate. The missing ballots were from people who supported the Black candidate. And some voters said they were brought ballots already sealed and told to sign them.

Tudor considers throwing away ballots to be “the most serious kind of election crime” and says that’s what he believed was happening there. Tudor’s boss agreed, and believed there to be multiple felony violations. Tudor and another investigator say they believed there was a conspiracy to target “vulnerable Black voters.”

In the end, Tudor says, all the prosecutors and the attorney general’s office said the statements from the Black citizens were “hard to prove, and the Black citizens were not educated and they were old, so they didn’t think they would stand up in court.”

Chace says the women who picked up the ballots declined to talk to her, and the people the ballots belonged to are dead now. She found one family member, who still seemed upset about it, but didn’t want to talk about it.

This was an actual case, Chace says, that was investigated and found to have merit, and yet, nothing happened.

Chace goes back to Britt and asks him about this case. Never heard of it, he says. But then in a few minutes, he does remember it. Could he have conflated this case with the nursing home case? Chace asks him. No, he says.

She tells Britt everything Tudor told her, but Britt doesn’t trust Tudor. Britt doesn’t trust her either, Chace said. He hates the media because it’s too biased, so he’s unmoved by her findings.

Britt keeps telling Chace that there’s much more that he knows about all this, but he can’t tell her.

“Time will tell” is all he’ll say.

Britt’s connection to Dowless

Chace looks closer at Britt.

He’s not just a “concerned county commissioner,” she says. He’s a big McCrae Dowless booster, and they are friends. He’s hired Dowless before, for one of his campaigns. He introduced Dowless to Mark Harris, the candidate Dowless is charged with cheating for. Britt picked up Dowless and drove him home from jail when he was arrested in connection to that case and released on bail.

She believes Britt is so focused on the story of the nursing home ballots because it’s a way of deflecting attention from Dowless, and he’s been doing that very publicly ever since the 2018 charges against Dowless. Feeding the fire of the accusations, Chace says, is that when Britt brought up the nursing home incident in the media in 2018, the state didn’t deny wrongdoing, choosing not to comment because Tudor no longer worked there.

All Black people look alike?

Chace lists the numerous allegations against the PAC that she has looked into, and says she hasn’t found anything substantive.

She goes back to the state board of elections and asks them if she was missing something . No, they tell her. No one there is investigating the PAC.

But Chace is still bothered by how Lisa Britt, during the 2018 Dowless hearing, testified that she had seen Horace Munn in Dowless’s office. (Lisa Britt is not related to Ray Britt, Chace says.) Munn was even asked to stand during the hearing so that Lisa Britt could point him out, “murder trial style.”

Munn denies that he worked with Dowless and says he hasn’t spoken to him in years. Chace asks Democrats and Republicans around Bladen about a Munn-Dowless connection, and everyone is baffled. She asks a woman who worked with Dowless if she’d ever seen Munn at the office, and she says no.

Chace says she has tried many times over the years to get an interview with Dowless and he has always politely declined.

But, she did get this much out of Dowless last summer: “I wouldn’t even know Horace Munn’s phone number, to be honest,” he says. “But I can tell you this, Horace Munn has never been to my office.”

Chace asks Horace Munn why Lisa Britt would say that he was in Dowless’s office, and Munn says that to white people, all Black people look alike. It had to have been another Black man.

Lisa Britt would not talk to Chace.

‘A rot from within’

Chace ties all of this back to the allegations of voter fraud from former President Donald Trump after the presidential election, and how people believe such allegations will fade away once there is no proof.

But she says once accusations have been repeated enough times, they stick, even if they are baseless.

Chace says she has learned from her work in Bladen County that instances of actual election fraud are usually very small and self-contained, but accusations of election fraud linger and grow. So the true story, she says, is that the suspicion of fraud can affect people way more directly than actual fraud, which is rare.

Chace ends the third episode with a big tease for Episode 4. We’re going to get the rest of the story about how the cheating accusations have weakened the Bladen PAC — this time in a way Horace Munn didn’t see coming: the accusations were starting to cause “a rot from within,” Chace says.

How to listen to ‘The Improvement Association’

There are five episodes of “The Improvement Association.”

You can listen from “The Improvement Association” landing page on The New York Times website, or download through Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you normally listen to podcasts.

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